CAIR Reveals the Jihadist Enemy Within (Part Two)

 

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) “enemy’s main focus of effort” in the United States is “Information Warfare,” wrote former FBI agent and United States Marine Corps officer John Guandolo in 2013. His book, Raising a Jihadi Generation: Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood Movement in America, remains highly relevant almost a decade later in confronting MB-derived groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

As previously discussed, CAIR has faced increased criticism due to disturbing connections to the January 15 jihadist terrorist attack upon a synagogue in a Fort Worth, Texas, suburb. Yet CAIR and its allies have made significant inroads into American opinion- and policymaking circles in recent decades. As Guandolo wrote, the MB “problem is much more a counterintelligence and espionage problem than it is a counterterrorism problem.”

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who in the 1990s obtained the conviction of the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, trenchantly examined this issue in a forward to Guandolo’s book. Countering the MB in the United States demands “understanding how the enemy operates in our midst,” McCarthy wrote, but American government “agencies, like our opinion elites, have been derelict in this duty.” As he elaborated,

for two decades, there has been a wayward campaign in the West to obscure the Islamic supremacist ideology. This seems absurd on its face: Putting aside the obvious wisdom in Sun Tzu’s ancient epigram, “Know your enemy,” what would the West look like today if the United States and its freedom-loving allies refused to examine and plan their national defenses around the totalitarian ideologies of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union?

McCarthy in the forward traced the reasons for what he described in his 2008 book as Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad:

In part, this is explained by political corrects and well-meaning desire not to offend Muslims—a tragically counterproductive mindset since appeasement of the Brotherhood suppresses authentically moderate and pro-American Muslims. In part, it is explained by the ascendancy in politics, media and academe of progressives, whose default position is that threats to American national security are natural responses to American arrogance, not rooted in a supremacist ideology that predates America by many centuries. And in part, it owes to the success of the enemy doctrine itself, which prizes infiltration of a target society’s opinion-driving institutions.

By contrast a glimmer of hope appeared to McCarthy in the juries before which he prosecuted jihadists:

As we learned in the 1990s, and are relearning today, there are significant downsides to making the civilian criminal justice our nation’s preferred counterterrorism weapon. A foreign enemy force that projects force globally and on a massive scale is not a mere criminal defendant; to treat it as such is a provocative display of weakness that can only embolden those for whom killing Americans is a core objective. All that said, however, the Justice Departments prosecution of terrorism cases has had one advantage unequaled by any other component of the government’s counterterrorism arsenal: The common sense of juries.

Through the presentation of evidence necessary to obtain convictions from jurors, McCarthy noted,

the trials of Islamic supremacists—from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, through such al Qaeda atrocities as the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Eastern Africa, to the Holy Land Foundation conspiracy to underwrite Hamas’s intifada against Israel—developed a comprehensive and convincing exposition of the enemy’s threat doctrine.

By contrast, McCarthy observed, America’s

government’s national security components—law enforcement, military, and intelligence—have steadfastly resisted undertaking what jurors, in their common sense, have always seen as a basic obligation of service: the need to know why.

As Guandolo wrote, the “very organizations in the U.S. government charged with defending Americans against such a threat do not even know this threat exists.” He noted absurdities such as how occasionally

Federal agents and officers have reported their bosses have told local Imams about an upcoming raid a couple of hours before or even the night before to “promote good relations with the Muslim community.”

Such ignorance overlooked basic problems in historic Islamic doctrine, Guandolo observed. “There is no Islamic Law that does not require jihad as ‘warfare against non-Muslims’ until all the world is claimed for Islam,” he wrote, for example. Yet opposed to such elementary canons, a

principle goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is to keep the West from studying authoritative Islamic Law—their stated doctrine. This doctrine is taught at the first grade level across the Middle East, and in English in U.S. Islamic Schools and Mosques.

“Raising a Jihadi Generation,” McCarthy wrote,

is a badly needed corrective to this dereliction. A law enforcement agent, an intelligence officer, or a military adviser who spent an hour reading it would learn more than any student of the government’s trendy and extensive “Muslim outreach” courses, many of which are actually designed and vetted for approval by Brotherhood sympathizers.

Guandolo’s account penetrated such propaganda, McCarthy observed, for it is

fact-laden, which is to say, heavily reliant on what has been proved in court and what is undeniably written in the core texts revered by Islamic supremacists. It gets right to the heart of what a competent investigator or intelligence operative would need to know in order to do his or her job.

Confronting groups such as CAIR will require transferring such evidentiary techniques tested in court to the court of public opinion. As Guandolo noted, private citizens in any public endeavor should ask, “How is my organization vetting individuals and organizations to ensure they are not a part of this hostile and clearly dangerous movement in my community?” In the end, homeland security begins at home.